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Blog I'm at the airport once again, this time returning home from Storage Networking World Spring, held in Santa Clara, CA this week.

The value of the event

SNW is one of the most important events in the storage world and it's a great opportunity to meet in person all the people that run the storage market business.

Indeed the most important thing of SNW is not the content of the conference, which is good but not at the highest level, nor the expo area, which is very limited in space and in the number of exhibitors.

The most important value of this event comes from the networking opportunities that this place offers. It's the best way to meet Analysts, Journalists, bloggers and vendors all in the same place to discuss storage trends, technologies and such. The proof of what I'm saying is the peak achieved Tuesday night during the #storagebeers meetup where I met almost every storage market influencer attending SNW (and some that weren't attending too).

The business bit

During these four days I met a couple of really interesting startups (Tintri and Scality above all): there are a lot of new products and ideas coming from many new small and niche players. If someone made the mistake of thinking that the storage game is closed after 2010's big acquisitions, SNW was the right place to change their mind.

Someone missed the party; EMC was really underrepresented! I actually didn't met people from it at all. The absence was more evident now that EMC is so vocal in social media snf social networking. Was that a marketing error or a thought-out move? ®

Enrico Signoretti is the CEO of Cinetica, a small consultancy firm in Italy, which offers services to medium/large companies in finance, manufacturing, and outsourcing). The company has partnerships with Oracle, Dell, VMware, Compellent and NetApp.